One of my favorite songs

There are so many songs I like that naming one as my favorite above all others is impossible; however I can say that "Tears From the Moon" by Conjure One is a definite contender. It starts out with a smooth, mystic, eastern feel and violins joining in. This feel intensifies as soon as drums start in place of the violins shortly before the voice of the girl joins and begins to twist and slide with the music as she tells her story. The first words are "Couldn't sleep, so I went out walking [pause] thinking about you and hearing us talking [pause] and all the things I should have said [pause] echo now inside my head [pause] I feel something falling from the sky, I'm so sad I made the angels cry, tears from the moon [pause] fall down like rain, I reach for you [pause] I reach in vain..." guitars and the violins provide emphasis that mingles with her voice or the pauses between words. This song is a great blend of tempo, lyrics, voice, instruments (synthesized and real), and variation that is wonderful to listen to. As beautiful as it is the list of songs that I like just as much as it would take more than two hours to listen to not counting repeated plays of the ones that seem too short ("Ebudae" by Enya for example).

Audio essay

I like the essay "From Hip-Hop Comes Hope" http://www.thisibelieve.org/dsp_ShowEssay.php?uid=31467. My favorite part was when the author quotes the lyrics of the particular song that changed how she viewed hip-hop as a genre. I like the message that music helps people get through tough times because I think that it can really help. I can also empathize with the author when she says "Working with the beats helps me move faster..." because I find that music has helpful effects depending on what I am listening to and why. Sometimes it is the lyrics that are most important and at others it is the background, pace, or combination of elements that creates the desired effect. In short I would say that this is my favorite of the audio essays we listened to and the ones I looked at because it it the one that is easiest for me to identify with in most respects.

Saturday

This Saturday I went with my older brother and my dad to an OHV area not far from Grand Lake. We got on the road at about 10:15 am with two DRZ400s and a KLR650 loaded into the back of my brother's truck. When we arrived at the staging area for the ATV trails we were going to ride on we found that one of the DRZs had got an oil leak sometime after we had loaded it into the truck, but thankfully we were able to repair it well enough for the DRZ to be used. We started out on the trail at about 1 pm. My brother was on his KLR; my dad and I were on the much lighter DRZs which was good, because we had much less off road experience. Along the first trail I dropped the DRZ I was riding several times which isn't too surprising considering that I have, by far, the least experience out of the three of us. A short way along the second trail I pointed out that the DRZ I was on was starting to overheat. When we took a closer look we found that the oil leak had started to ooze again; Most likely because of the time I dropped it after jumping (mostly unintentionally) off a natural ramp and subsequently: the trail. Deciding that between the hour of challenging riding, the overheating engine, the scrape on my left knee, and the bruises on the upper half of my right leg I should head back to the truck on the forest road and wait for my brother and my dad to finish the second trail without me. Once they got back and we had started heading home around 6:30 they told me about some of what they rode along after I had left. Judging by what they described, I would say that I made the right decision when I turned back. They described one point in particular where falling would have been really bad in a way that I doubt I could have avoided falling. Speaking of falling over, neither one of them fell over on the first trail (I fell 6 or 7 times by comparison), but they each dropped their motorcycle twice on the second trail. Despite the difficulty/injuries I had fun, did alright overall, and would like to ride some more trails.

Side notes: DRZ400s are extremely fun to ride; my older brother rides single track trails almost every weekend; my dad has been riding motorcycles for approximately 40 years; this was my third (and most challenging) experience with trail riding on a motorcycle, second time riding a DRZ400, and first time off-roading on a vehicle with specifications like those of the DRZ400.

My belief in friendship

I believe that friendship is one of the most important things in life. Not just having friends but really caring about them and everyone else in a general sense. The world would be a better place if everyone could be "friendly" to one another. I know that it would work from my own experiences. I listen to everyone who talks to me and offer assistance to anyone who wants it no matter how much doing so might disrupt my own life. This goes for people that I have never met before and people that I have known for years. Admittedly I would do more for the people I have known for longer but that is mostly because I have a better idea of what would help them. I have held this belief for years and to this day can honestly say that I don't know anyone who openly dislikes me or wouldn't ask me for help if they thought I could do so. Likewise there is nobody that I have met that I cannot get along with. Perhaps my quiet, easygoing, and slightly manic nature affect this but I believe it is my philosophy of friendship that is the biggest factor.

My mp3 player

My mp3 player could potentially drive someone insane if they don't like songs with words they can't understand or dislike certain genres of music. It only has a gigabyte of memory so there are only 243 songs on it but that would be enough once you take in the details. To start with I have the menu language set to German, which I took for four years in high school. Once that obstacle is navigated you get to the music itself. The songs can be classified into every genre I have ever heard of plus subcategories of them. Once that is understood let the fact that there are 16 different languages represented sink in. On top of that there are several songs that involve two languages and there is at least one that involves three. This is where the fun begins, making jumps from genre to genre and language to language through mind wrenching progressions of logic. Surely a love song about wanting to get back together should be followed by a song about things going to get better followed in turn by songs where things are working out and a dance to celebrate. The wrench jumps from hiding as the English hip-hop/rap goes to bi-lingual Greek/English STRANA and from there to Spanish/English dance music from Venezuela that was popular in the US around 1998-99 and back in time from there to a disco style song from 1985. After recovering from that take some Bon Jovie rock followed successively by Greek dance, American Pop love sung in German, American country with a shakespearian twist, back to German rock, German rap, French blues, ending with 1990's American R&B. If sanity remains after that I can use one of the features of my mp3 player to concoct other devastating mixes on the spot in a temporary playlist. If I wanted to try and had advance notice I could even add songs from several more languages and songs that are polar opposites to my mp3 player.

Eulogy for the past

The place is an old sky blue van with a white stripe along the side. It looks like the volkswagen vans that were popular in the sixties. It sits in the gravel off the north-east corner of my house beside the big brown ford truck from the same era in the driveway. The van is locked, only my dad has the key, stashed and hidden away in some unknown location. There is still a way to unlock it through the sunroof; a feat that only I can perform. The van has two front seats, the rest is windowless and empty: a cozy secretive den. A place that is not spectacular in any obvious way to an outside observer but is magical to the ones who know its secrets. One is my brother, four years my elder. Another is the girl in my class who lives just around the corner. Finally there is me, the one who can open this special place. What makes it special is that troubles and quarrels are have no power there.
Playing a game with my older brother, it is a place where we can rest happily without fighting the way young brothers tend to do. Where we can talk, invent and pretend whatever we want. It is like the van contains any world that you can dream of without needing to follow the rules of the one outside. We can go on lengthy road trips, driving anywhere at all at any speed, even though we don't physically leave home. The magic of the van makes everything fun, as if joy is the only emotion allowed and arguments or put-downs are strictly forbidden by an unseen force.
With the girl down the street it is different and simultaneously, it is the same. It is the same because all that matters is experiencing joy, friendship, and adventure. In the van we can easily talk for hours about everything, from school to personal problems knowing that the van won't share our secrets with anyone else. Secret problems that are meaningless in the confines of the van but shape everything that happens to us. When we don't want to talk about that outside world any more we create our own and adventure through them, playing together as perfect friends that don't care whether the other is a boy or a girl.
The van can only provide respite until it is time to go home, to play in the sun, eat, or go on to other things. The girl is long gone: she only lived down the street for a year before her parents moved again, vanishing with her in tow. The van disappeared later, sold at some point that I no longer remember. The truck that sat beside it is more recently departed and unlike the others I have seen it a couple times since it left. Most of all: I miss the time spent with those people, in that van.

Computer Games

I have been playing computer games to relax and have fun for the last couple days. While I was doing this it occurred to me that all of my favorite games (and in fact nearly all my games) are five or more years old. My computer may not be top of the line but it is still capable of running newer games that don't have totally insane requirements without any problems. After I thought about it for a while I realized that practically every new PC game is a remake of something and almost all of them fall into the categories of First Person Shooter (FPS); Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), or Real Time Strategy (RTS). I have nothing against these genres of games but I would like to see new games that follow the style of games like Descent 1-3, Freespace, Freespace 2; Trackmania Sunrise, Nations; Rollcage; Star Wars Racer; or even Need for Speed: SE and Need for Speed 3 from when the NFS games were about racing to have fun and had nothing to do with car customization. Going even further back to games like Jet Fighter 2; Starfighter; Zone Raiders; Space Quest 1-6; Kings Quest 1-5; and Quest for Glory 1 would be great.

On the other hand my opinions of all the games that have come out in recent years mean that I am not tempted to spend huge amounts of money on new games which makes saving money for other things far easier.